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Comment by ncr100 | Hacker News Reader

Computer Science does not have the same heightened degree of Ethical Concern that exists in other sciences. E.g. genetic manipulation of human embryos is highly scrutinized, and action is taken when behavior that would corrupt future generations of humans is identified. Not so with CS.

CS Ethics is muted, often conflated with Corporate Ethics whose "Greed is good" line seems to have won out above other ethical mantras.

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This is about corporate ethics. Just because these corporations happen to make use of computers doesn't make this a computer science issue.

Yet, computer scientists implement these systems, while being fully aware of the consequences.

If hospitals order doctors to do $BAD_THING, they protest. If an advertisement company orders computer scientists to implement $BAD_SYSTEM, they just comply.

I wouldn't call these issues matters of computer science. They're just marketing and consumer psych, and they've existed as long as businesses have.

The only difference now is that computers have enabled a level of efficient manipulation that wasn't possible before.

I believe the biological sciences have a higher degree of ethnics training than the other science fields, if only because most academic biological research requires oversight by an ethics board.

Other fields of science do not have the same heightened degree of Ethical Concern as biology, and many have less ethics training than CS programs.

For example, when I was at university, the CS program required that the students take a course in ethical topics related to computers. I believe that was due to ACS or IEEE accreditation requirements.

The physics program had no similar requirement for their students.

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